Laundry day!

There’s usually a laundry day in the trip. My last trip this spring I packed a bunch of old underwear and socks. I threw them away after wearing them and at some point I bought replacement underwear and socks on the trip. That meant for the first time I didn’t have to do laundry during the trip!

Unfortunately that also means I don’t have that much old underwear or socks anymore and I had to go back to doing laundry during the trip.

When Mariko and I were planning the trip she didn’t want to spend the weekend in Osaka because it gets crowded at the station. I convinced her we could take trips out of town if we needed to. Today we didn’t and just wandered around away from the station instead.

First, breakfast at the Tully’s in the MBS building! I had chicken toast instead of the hot dog.

Mariko had the hot dog.

We went to the MT tape store north of the station, wandered around that neightborhood, and then took the long way to Tenjinbashi and Japan’s longest shopping street. Towards the end of the street is the Osaka Tenmangu shrine where there were lots of festivities. Probably mostly Shichi Go San (the kid’s 3rd, 5th, and 7th year rites of passage).

We ended up running out of shopping street about 12:30 and I was starving. I was kind of hangry and wanted to stop at a small local place and so we tried this Bistro that had two ¥900 specials: hamburger steak and the special of the day. It turned out to be great, and quite a steal.

The special came with salad and a delicious soup.

I had the daily special which was chicken blanched with herbs. Mariko had the hamburger with demiglace.

Be careful if you want to try it: the proprietor said he runs the place by himself so he often skips opening for lunch.

Afterwards we went for cofee and they seated us in this closet with bizarre furniture.

Here’s a pciture Mariko took of me taking the picture of the weird furniture. They showed us the picture and asked if we were OK with the seating and I had to ask if we were supposed to sit on the plywood things. Turns out the plywood were tables.

I also had a cannele on a big fat plate. It was tasty. The coffee was good too.

On the way back we went through Ogimachi park which is pretty large with a pool and a huge kids play structure. We saw a giant Zumba class (at least that’s what I thought it was) and then saw a competition of “street gymnasts” doing amazing things on a high bar and parallel bars. The kid who won did lots of amazing tricks as well as static holds. His competitor only did static holds which were amazing but not nearly as flashy.

Oh, there was a ramen festival going on in the park as well.

Then we were mostly waiting for dinner. We saw an Italian restaurant that looked like the one we DIDN’T go to in Okayama because there really wasn’t anyone eating there. We ended up going to the busier one next door which was subpar. That was my mistake. This restaurant was tasty. We both had the pumpkin lasagna, which wasn’t baked but was stacked with fresh pasta squares.

And that was our day. We spent a lot of it walking through residential neighborhoods but that’s kind of what I like to do. 17,310 steps of it according to my phone.